Chapter V

Classes and Parties in the Debate on the Agrarian
Question in the Second Duma

We think it will be useful to approach the question of the
workers’ party’s agrarian programme in the Russian bourgeois
revolution from another and somewhat different angle. The analysis of the
economic conditions for the revolution and of the political arguments in
favour of this or that programme should be supplemented by a picture of the
struggle between the different classes and parties that will as far as
possible embrace all the interests and place them in direct contrast to one
another. Only such a picture can give us an idea of the thing we are
discussing (the struggle for the land in the Russian revolution) as a
whole, excluding the one-sided and accidental character of individual
opinions, and testing theoretical conclusions by the practical intuition of
the persons concerned. As individuals, any representatives of parties and
classes may err, but when they come out in the public arena, before the
entire population, the individual errors are inevitably rectified by the
corresponding groups or classes that are interested in the
struggle. Classes do not err; on the whole, they decide their interests and
political aims in conformity
with the conditions of the struggle and with the conditions of social
evolution.

Excellent material for drawing such a picture is provided by the
Stenographic Records of the two Dumas. We shall take the Second Duma
because it undoubtedly reflects the struggle of classes in the Russian
revolution more fully and with greater maturity: the Second Duma elections
were not boycotted by any influential party. The political grouping of the
deputies in the Second Duma was much more definite, the various Duma groups
were more united and more closely connected with their respective
parties. The experience of the First Duma had already provided considerable
material which helped all the parties to elaborate a more thought-out
policy. For all these reasons it is preferable to take the Second Duma. We
shall refer to the debate in the First Duma only in order to supplement, or
clarify, statements made in the Second Duma.

To obtain a full and accurate picture of the struggle between the
different classes and parties during th.e debate in the Second Duma we
shall have to deal separately with each important and specific Duma group
and characterise it with the aid of excerpts from the principal speeches
delivered on the chief points of the agrarian question. As it is impossible
and unnecessary to quote all the minor speakers, we shall mention only
those who contributed something new, or threw noteworthy light on some
aspect of the question.

The main groups of Duma deputies that stood out clearly in the debates on the
agrarian question were the following:
(1) the Rights and the Octobrists—as we shall see, no essential
difference between them was shown in the Second Duma;
(2) the Cadets;
(3) the Right and Octobrist peasants, standing, as we shall see, to the
Left of the Cadets;
(4) the non-party peasants;
(5) the Narodniks, or Trudovik intellectuals, standing somewhat to the
Right of
(6) the Trudovik peasants; then come
(7) the Socialist-Revolutionaries;
(8) the “nationals”, representing the non-Russian
nationalities, and
(9) the Social-Democrats. We shall mention the government’s position
in connection with the Duma group with which the government is essentially
in agreement.

1. The Rights and the Octobrists

The stand taken by the Rights on the agrarian question was undoubtedly best
expressed by Count Bobrinsky in the speech he delivered on March 29, 1907 (18th
session of the Second Duma). In a dispute with the Left-wing priest Tikhvinsky
about the Holy Scriptures, and their commandments to obey the powers that be,
and recalling. “the cleanest and brightest page in Russian history”
(1289)[1]
–the
emancipation of the serfs (we shall deal with this later on)—the
count approached the agrarian question “with open
visor”. “About 100 or 150 years ago the peasants, nearly
everywhere in Western Europe, were as poverty-stricken, degraded, and
ignorant as our peasants are today. They had the same village communes as
we have in Russia, with division of land per head, that typical survival of
the feudal system” (1293). Today, continued the speaker, the peasants
in Western Europe are well off. The question is, what miracle transformed
“the poverty-stricken, degraded peasant into a prosperous and useful
citizen who has respect for himself and for others”? “There can be
only one answer: that miracle was performed by individual peasant
ownership, the form of ownership that is so detested here, on the Left, but
which we, on the Right, will defend with all the strength of our minds,
with all the strength of our earnest convictions, for we know that in
ownership lie, the strength and future of Russia”
(1294). “Since the middle of last century agronomic chemistry has
made wonderful... discoveries in plant nutrition, and the peasants
abroad— small owners equally [??] with big ones—have succeeded
in utilising these, scientific discoveries, and by employing artificial
fertilisers have achieved a still further increase in crop yield; and
today, when our splendid black earth yields only 30 to 35 poods of grain,
and sometimes not even enough for seed, the peasants abroad, year after
year, get an average yield ranging from 70 to 120 poods, depending on the
country and climatic conditions. Here you have the solution of the agrarian
problem. This is no dream, no
fantasy. It is an instructive historical example. And the Russian peasant
will not follow in the footsteps of Pugachov and
Stenka Razin[3] with the cry
‘saryn na kichku![4] [Don’t be too sure of that, Count!]
He will follow the only true road, the road that was taken by all the
civilised nations, the road taken by his neighbours in Western Europe, and,
lastly, the road taken by our Polish brothers, by the West-Russian
peasants, who have already realised how disastrous is the commune and
homestead strip system of ownership, and in some places have already begun
to introduce the khutor system” (1296). Count Bobrinsky goes
on to say; and rightly, that “this road was indicated in 1861, when
the peasants were freed from serf dependence”. He advises the
government not to grudge “tens of millions” for the purpose of
“creating a well-to-do class of peasant-proprietors”. He
declares: “This, gentlemen, in general outline, is our agrarian
programme. It is not. a programme of election and propaganda promises. It
is not a programme for breaking up the existing social and juridical norms
lit is a programme for forcibly getting rid of millions of peasants]; it is
not a programme of dangerous fantasies, it is a quite practicable programme
[that is still open to question] and one that has been well-tried [what is
true is true]. And it is high time to abandon dreams about some sort of
economic exceptionalism of the Russian nation.... But how are we to explain
the fact that quite impracticable Bills, like that of the Trudovik Group
and that of the Party of People’s Freedom, have been introduced in a
serious legislative assembly? No parliament in the world has ever heard of
all the land being taken over by the state, or of the land being taken from
Paul and given to Peter.... The appearance of these Bills is the result of
bewilderment” (a fine explanation!).... “And so, Russian
peasants, you have to choose between two roads: one road is broad and looks
easy—that is the road of usurpation and compulsory alienation, for
which calls have been made here. That road is attractive at first, it runs
downhill, but it ends i.n a precipice [for the landlords? 1, and spells
ruin to the peasantry and the entire state. The other road is narrow and
thorny, and runs uphill, but it leads to the summits of truth, right, and
lasting prosperity” (1299).

As the reader sees, this is the government’s programme. This is
exactly what Stolypin is accomplishing with his famous agrarian legislation
under Article 87. Purishkevich formulated the same programme in his
agrarian theses (20th session, April 2, 1907, pp. 1532-33). The same
programme was advocated, part by part, by the Octobrists, beginning with
Svyatopolk-Mirsky on the first day of the debates on the agrarian question
(March 19), and ending with Kapustin (“the peasants need landownership
and not land tenure, as is proposed”—24th session, April 9, 1907,
p. 1805, speech by Kapustin, applauded by the Right “and part of the
Centre”).

In the programme of the Black Hundreds and the Octobrists there is not even a
hint about defending pre-capitalist forms of farming, as, for example,
by vaunting patriarchal agriculture, and so forth. Defence of the village
commune, which until quite recently had ardent champions among the higher
bureaucracy and the landlords, has given place to bitter hostility towards
it. The Black Hundreds fully take the stand of capitalist development and
definitely depict a programme that is economically progressive, European; this
needs to be specially emphasised, because a vulgar and simplified view of the
nature of the reactionary policy of the landlords is very widespread among
us. The liberals often depict the Black Hundreds as clowns and fools, but it
must be said that this description is far more applicable to the Cadets. Our
reactionaries, however, are distinguished by their extremely pronounced
class-consciousness. They know perfectly well what they want, where they are
going, and on what forces they can count. They do not betray a shadow of
half-heartedness or irresolution (at all events in the Second Duma; in the
First there was “bewilderment”—among the Bobrinskys!). They are
clearly seen to be connected with a very definite class, which is accustomed to
command, which correctly judges the conditions necessary for preserving
its rule in a capitalist environment, and brazenly defends its
interests even if that entails the rapid extinction, degradation, and eviction
of millions of peasants. The Black-Hundred programme is reactionary not because
it seeks to perpetuate any pre capitalist relations or system (in that respect
all the parties
of the period of the Second Duma. already, in essence, take the stand of
recognising capitalism, of taking it for granted), but because it stands
for the Junker type of capitalist development in order to
strengthen the power arid to increase the incomes of the landlords, in
order to place the edifice of autocracy upon a new and stronger
foundation. There is no contradiction between what these gentle men say and
what they do; our reactionaries, too, are “businessmen”, as
Lassalle said of the German reactionaries in contrast to the liberals.

What is the attitude of these people towards the idea of nationalising
the land? Towards, say, the partial nationalisation with compensation demanded
by the Cadets in the First Duma, leaving, like the Mensheviks, private
ownership of small holdings and creating a state land reserve out of the rest of
the land? Did they not perceive in the nationalisation idea the possibility of
strengthening the bureaucracy, of consolidating the central bourgeois government
against the proletariat, of restoring “state feudalism” and the
“Chinese experiment”?

On the contrary, every hint at nationalisation of the land infuriates them, and
they fight it in such a way that one would think they had borrowed their
arguments from Plekhanov. Take the nobleman Vetchinin, a Right land
lord. “I think,” he said at the 39th session on May 16, 1907,
“that the question of compulsory alienation must be decided in the
negative sense from the point of view of the law. The advocates of that opinion
forget that the violation of the rights of private owners is characteristic of
states that are at a low stage of social and political development. It is
sufficient to recall the Muscovy period, when the tsar often took land away from
private owners and later granted it to his favourites and to the
monasteries. What did that attitude of the government lead to? The consequences
were frightful” (619).

Such was the use made of Plekhanov’s “restoration of Muscovy Rus”!
Nor is Vetchinin the only one to harp on this string. In the First Duma, the
landlord N. Lvov, who was elected as a Cadet and then went over to the Right,
and after the dissolution of the First Duma negotiated with Stolypin for a place
in the Ministry—that personage
put the question in exactly the same way. “The astonishing thing
about the Bill of the 42,” he said concerning the Bill that the
Cadets. introduced in the First Duma, “is that it bears the impress
of the same old bureaucratic despotism which seeks to put everything on an
equal level” (12th session, May 19, 1906, pp. 479-80). He, quite in
the spirit of Maslov, “stood up for” the non-Russian
nationalities: “How are we to subordinate to it [equalisation] the
whole of Russia, including Little Russia, Lithuania, Poland, and the Baltic
region?” (479.) “In St. Petersburg,” he warned,
“you will have to set up a gigantic Land Office... and maintain a
staff of officials in every corner of the country” (480).

These outcries about bureaucracy and serfdom in connection with
nationalisation—these outcries of our municipalisers, inappropriately
copied from the German model— are the dominant note in all the
speeches of the Right. The Octobrist Shidlovsky, for example, opposing
compulsory alienation, accuses the Cadets of advocating “attachment
to the land” (12th session of the Second Duma, March 19, 1907,
p. 752). Shulgin howls about property being in violate, about compulsory
alienation being “the grave of culture and civilisation” (16th
session, March 26, 1907, p. 1133). Shulgin refers—he might have been
quoting from Plekhanov’s
Diary,[5] though he does not say so—to twelfth-century
China, to the deplorable result of the Chinese experiment in
nationalisation (p. 1137). Here is Skirmunt in the First Duma: The state
will be the owner! “A blessing, an El Dorado for the
bureaucracy” (10th session, May 16, 1906, p. 410). Here is the
Octobrist Tantsov, exclaiming in the Second Duma: “With far greater
justification, these reproaches [about serfdom] can be flung back to the
Left and to the Centre. What do these Bills hold out for the peasants in
reality if not the prospect of being tied to the land, if not the old
serfdom, only in a different form, in which the place of the landlord will
be taken by usurers and government officials” (39th session, May 16,
1907, p. 653).

Of course, the hypocrisy of these outcries about bureaucracy is most glaring,
for the excellent idea of setting up local laud committees to be elected by
universal, direct, and equal suffrage by secret ballot was advanced by the very
peasants who are demanding nationalisation. But the Black-Hundred landlords
are compelled to seize on every possible argument against
nationalisation. Their class instinct tells them that nationalisation in
twentieth-century Russia is inseparably bound up with a peasant
republic. In other countries, where, owing to objective conditions, there
can not be a peasant agrarian revolution, the situation is, of course,
different—for example, in Germany, where the Kanitzes can sympathise
with plans for nationalisation, where the socialists will not even hear of
nationalisation, where the bourgeois movement for nationalisation is
limited to intellectualist sectarianism. To combat the peasant revolution
the Rights had to come before the peasants in the role of
champions of peasant ownership as against nationalisation. We have
seen one example in the case of Bobrinsky. Here is another—Vetchinin:
“This question [of nationalising the land] must, of course, be
settled in the negative sense, for it finds no sympathy even among the
peasants; they want to have land by right of ownership and not by right of
tenancy” (39th session, p. 621). Only landlords and cabinet ministers
could speak for the peasants in that manner. This fact is
so well known that I regard it as superfluous to quote the speeches of the
Gurkos, Stolypins, and other such heroes, who ardently champion private
ownership.

The only exception among the flights is the Terek Cossack Karaulov,
whom we have already
mentioned.[2]
Agreeing partly also with the Cadet Shingaryov, Karaulov said that the
Cossack troops are a “huge agrarian commune” (1363), that
“it is better to abolish private ownership of the land” than to
abolish the village communes, and he advocated the “extensive
municipalisation of the land, to be converted into the property of the
respective regions” (1367). At the same time he complained about the
pinpricks of the bureaucracy. “We are not the masters of our own
property,” he said (1368). With the significance of these Cossack
sympathies for municipalisation we have already dealt above.

Notes

[1]Here and elsewhere the figures indicate the pages of Stenographic
Record. —Lenin

[3]Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachov—leaders of great
peasant revolts in Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[4]Saryn na kichku (literally, “to the prow,
lubbers!”)—a cry said to have been used by Volga freebooters
ordering the people on a board ed vessel to lie down in the bows and stay
there until the looting was over.

[5]Plekhanov’s “Diary”—Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata
(Diary of a Social-Democrat)—a non-periodical organ
published at considerable intervals by Plekhanov in Geneva from March 1905
to April 1912.
In all, sixteen issues were brought out. Publication was resumed in
Petrograd in 1916, but only one issue appeared: In the first eight issues
(1905-06) Plekhanov expounded extremely Right-wing Menshevik and
opportunist views, advocated a bloc between Social-Democracy and the
liberal bourgeoisie, rejected the idea of an alliance of the proletariat
and the peasantry, and condemned the December uprising. In 1909-12
(Nos. 9-16), he opposed the Menshevik liquidators, who sought to disband
the underground Party organisations. On the basic questions of tactics,
however, he took a Menshevik stand. Plekhanov’s social-chauvinist
views were forcibly expressed in the. issue No. 1 published in 1916.